Country: Hungary
NKM Nemzeti Közművek Ltd (“Nemzeti Közművek” or the “Company”) had been established as the national utility service provider to contribute, by defending national interests, to the Hungarian Government’s utility cost reduction program in a long term and to maintain utility fees at a reasonable level for Hungarian consumers.
The main task of Nemzeti Közművek is to ensure and control a consistent and centralised national system of public utilities and to establish and maintain a sustainable operation of the public utilities such as natural gas, electricity and district heating. The Company’s further aims are driven by its corporate responsibility, e.g. increasing security in domestic supply and to provide customer service simpler, faster and accessible. 
The fundamental basis of the national public utility service model is to carry out activities on the basis of comprehensive community criteria and in line with the Hungarian Government’s social policy. The system can simultaneously represent and enforce the market based activity and a non-profit principle, as income realised from activities would be recontributed into the system to enhance services by making consumers’ interest a top priority. 
Nemzeti Közművek provides unified management for such national utility system. Licensed activities, such as gas trading or gas distribution are performed by state owned companies where control is carried out by the Company. Nemzeti Közművek is not a public utility service provider and has no direct contact with consumers, but operates as a holding centre, exercising management-rights over the companies participating in the national utility system. 
Nemzeti Közművek is tasked to identify those areas at the companies belonging to the national utility system where cost optimization and synergies could be arranged. The Company shall optimise the size of the systems and ensure cost-efficiency through further acquisitions in the utility sector in the future. The public utility service which already operates 300 customer service offices countrywide, shall become faster than before, because by combining the various pillars of the national utility system consumers can deal with their gas, electricity and district heating related issues at one place in the near future.
Nemzeti Közművek is a state owned company where ownership rights are exercised by the Government Commissioner of State for National Financial Services and Postal Affairs. In 2015 and 2016 Nemzeti Közművek has been building the gas pillar of the national utility system by gaining control over Főgáz Ltd and GDF Suez retail gas company, GSEM Ltd. and took over more than 1,8 consumers from E.ON Energy Services Ltd. and Tigáz Ltd., resulting 3,4 million natural gas consumers in Hungary serviced by the national utility service provider. 
At the end of 2016, Nemzeti Közművek started to build the second pillar of the system by signing the contract of purchasing DÉMÁSZ and DÉMÁSZ Hálózati Elosztó Ltd. from EDF International. The third pillar of the national utility system and so of Nemzeti Közművek will be district heating.
 
 
ROLE IN THE PROJECT
The multi-level layer market framework needs different level of involvement. The experience of several DSOs are needed to allow comparisons and to obtain multi market data. NKM can bring such a market player group into the demo, which can reach quite high penetration of household scale renewable generation. Through this group, NKM will provide the household scale market information as well as a demo area for testing. The analysed data can be used for formulating recommendations for the future operation.